Archeologists recount actions of bold looters
Sergeant Janis Albuquerque, a US Army reservist from Virginia, was in street clothes walking through a bazaar in Baghdad when a man approached and offered her a clay cup purportedly dating from ancient Babylon.
Albuquerque, who served for 14 months in Iraq, recognized that the man might be one of the legions of illegal art dealers who have smuggled thousands of artifacts from the country since US troops captured Baghdad in 2003. Relating the encounter to archeologists who gathered in Boston yesterday, she said she reported the man to the military.
Albuquerque's story illustrated the way looters and art smugglers in Iraq have become bolder since the US occupation began in April 2003. Two years after US troops entered Iraq, the national museum remains in a virtual lockdown, thousands of artifacts are missing, and archeologists say it is too dangerous to go to Baghdad.
Archeologists who have worked to recover stolen artifacts and rebuild damaged sites shared their findings about the dire situation of Iraq's rich collection of antiquities at a session yesterday of the Archeological Institute of America. Iraqi officials asked not to be identified by name, citing security concerns.
John Malcolm Russell, a professor at the Massachusetts College of Art who served as an adviser to the Coalition Provision Authority in Iraq, clicked through a series of slides of archeological sites that had been looted.
The images showed how grounds relatively undisturbed prior to the US invasion are nowpockmarked with looters' pits.
Russell, who had criticized the US troops for their inadequate protection of museums and archeological sites after they captured Baghdad in April 2003, also showed slides of recovered artifacts, including the prized alabaster Lady of Warka mask.
He also showed slides of the new fences around Iraq's National Museum, a roof added to a once-exposed archeological site, and a fleet of pickup trucks bought for a force formed to protect artifacts. Another slide showed how a passage once used by looters has become a concrete wall.
At the conference, specialists said that 15,000 objects remained missing, while just over 3,323 have been returned. There is evidence that thieves tried to smuggle out more than 1,000 objects through Jordan and 300 via Syria.
Thomas Strasser, a California State University archeologist who attended the presentation and criticized the US government, said archeologists could not protect antiquities without more help.
"These guys are doing the best they can in a desperate situation, but it's going downhill," he said.
Others said the lack of knowledge in cultural matters was a main reason for the conflict between the military and the archeologists. 